


Kaveri

by BristlingBassoon



Category: Tuntematon sotilas | The Unknown Soldier - Väinö Linna
Genre: 1940s, Christmas Presents, Everyone Is Gay, Finland (Country), Karelia - Freeform, Knitting, Marriage of Convenience, Multi, Post-Canon, Post-War, hygge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22686079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BristlingBassoon/pseuds/BristlingBassoon
Summary: Rokka and Susi want to give each other Christmas presents
Relationships: Antti Rokka/Susi, Tyyne/Lyyti
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Kaveri

**Author's Note:**

> From what I can tell, the first english-language Tuntsa fic on Ao3! This is postwar, but I forgot that they had kids so there's no kids. Enjoy some delightful Christmas times in postwar Finland. I'd like to thank my very own Suomalainen kaveri (haha, my tyttöystava) for checking this to make sure that it was Finnish enough. I'm not exactly good enough at Finnish to read the book untranslated yet, and given that it's so full of dialect, I'm not sure I ever will be.

When Rokka woke, it was to a thick, white morning. The light filtered through the rough little windows with the apathy of Eastern Finland in winter, but the blue-and-white tiled stove next to the bed was throwing out a friendly warmth, like the embrace of a happy friend.   
He looked about him for a moment, noticing the weird round shadows the rye bread above him threw on the floor. Then he rolled toward’s Susi’s sleepy form, and curled his limbs about him and kissed him.  
Susi grumbled, stirring and muttering. Delighted, Rokka kissed him on the forehead again.  
“Hey Susi! It’s morning!”  
“Is it, now?”   
Susi had a point. There wasn’t really any way of telling whether it was morning or night, except for the fact that Rokka knew it.   
“Now, I’m gonna leave you while I get some more wood,” said Rokka, “and then I’m gonna go and see whether we got anything in the traps and then ski over to check on the ladies.”  
The ladies being Lyyti and Tyyne, their nominal wives.   
“Wait,” grumbled Susi, struggling out of his thick roll of quilts. “You need to have some puuro first-“  
But Rokka had already pulled on his trousers over his nightshirt and thrown on a pullover and his old army coat. “No time!” he said cheerfully, tugging on his boots by the door and grabbing his skis.   
He glided away from the house, delighting in the crunch of the snow and the quiet crackle of the forest expanding and contracting in the cold. The odd dash of a creature here and there - a fox, an ermine maybe, and in the trees, slumbering forms of owls.  
As Rokka went about his morning tasks, he thought of Susi stirring the porridge back at home, and how he would pull on two pairs of socks to walk over the whistling draughty floor, because both pairs had holes in different places. The house was warm enough, but this winter the boards in the floor had drawn away from each other. He resolved ask the wives if they had a rug he could borrow. Of course, he could fix the floor, but he might have to pry up the boards to do that, and that would have to wait until spring. 

“Hey there Tyyne, Lyyti! How’s that wife of mine!” Rokka said happily, handing the women one of the frozen rabbits he’d collected.   
In some ways, Tyyne and Lyyti’s house was the better one. The walls were covered with rugs in lovely warm shades of lichen brown, their porridge was warming on the stove, a big sticky pot of blueberry jam was on the table and they had a proper boot rack by the door as opposed to a pile of discarded boots. But the house wasn’t as big. Whenever Rokka wanted a new room, he just chopped a hole in the side of his house and got building, whereas the ladies had a repurposed schoolhouse of red-painted boards, and had had to hang up curtains to delineate the interior rooms. There was still the odd botanical chart on the wall, filling in any space not covered in rugs, and their bed nestled up closely to the blackboard.   
Tyyne had been a schoolteacher back in Karjala, and had been offered the schoolhouse to run when she had been forced to leave. But there were no children anymore. They were still coming home from Sweden, and might not even return to a part of the country so precarious, where only a ribbon of forest and a fence separated them from their old country, now held by their new enemy, with whom they had brokered a tentative peace. Not that the Russians would give Karjala back. Here was as close as they could all get.  
This bothered Rokka in more ways than one. The thought of the Ruskies putting their feet up in his old house in his beloved Kannas, boiling pierogies on his stove and probably chopping holes in the floor whenever they needed more firewood - but then also the thought that the kids were going to come eventually and Tyyne and Lyyti would have to move out of the schoolhouse because they weren’t really supposed to be living there and were only getting away with it because the old teacher was as perceptive as a turnip and the school board was all dead. Besides, they didn’t even have a sauna. They had to come over and use his and Susi’s.  
“I’m gonna get started on your house come Spring,” said Rokka as he pulled off his boots. “A man’s gotta provide for his wife.”   
Lyyti portioned him out some porridge.  
“How’s Susi?”  
“He’s wearing these terrible old socks,” Rokka said as he ate, holding the bowl fast to the table as if it were going to roll away. “One of them has the heel all gone, the other has no toes. Lissen- would you have a rug I can borrow?”  
Tyyne untacked one of the rugs from the wall and started to roll it. Then she stopped, noticing two balls of grey wool on the chest beneath the rug, bristling with needles, like two defensive hedgehogs. She finished rolling the rug, plucked out four needles from the ball and handed both the points and the wool to Rokka, who took them as if they were some kind of arcane weapons.  
“Why don’t you knit Susi some socks?”  
Socks! He’d learned to knit them when he was a kid, and had wished he had time to knit a new pair during the winter war, when his socks had blown out, but there wasn’t any wool to be had, so he’d had to make do with patching his socks with the wool from the cuffs of his mittens, leaving him with unravelling mitts for the rest of the war. Now, he regarded the double pointed needles and the grey yarn with purpose. He would knit socks for Susi. Christmas was coming up, it was 3 weeks away. He was sure he could make them by then.

Susi stirred the porridge with one hand, the little oats swelling delightfully in the hot water. With the other, he stirred another pot, bubbling with strange brackish lumps.   
Three days ago he had gone out to the forest with a knife and a bucket, and rummaged under the snow and at the roots of trees, searching for frills of lichen like a hungry reindeer. He’d already brewed up two pots of dyestuff, using a dented iron pot. This would give him dark, sombre colours. Some of the lichen was soaking in a ceramic bowl - for pure colour, uncontaminated by iron. He moved the pot off the heat and carefully dunked a creamy hank of wool into the black water. Another hank dripped over a bucket near the stove.  
There was no way Antti was going to be less than three hours. When his kaveri got talking to his wife, there was no stopping him. If he timed it right, he’d be able to get all of his dyeing done before Antti came back. Susi ladled himself out a bowl of porridge, and topped it with a pat of butter. He relaxed in the lichenous steam of the kitchen, feet up on a small footstool to give his aching leg a rest.   
Everything was all going to plan. He’d shaved down some sturdy twigs into needles, and had drawn a little chart in his diary. He was going to knit Antti the thickest, fleeciest, most brilliantly patterned socks the man had ever seen, and he was going to do it without Antti suspecting a thing.

Rokka took off his skis outside the sauna and went to light the fire. The two women continued towards the house. They pushed inside and were greeted by the sight of Susi washing pots.  
“No woman would hope to dream of having a husband who even touched a pot, and yet I find mine scrubbing them!” said Tyyne jokingly. Susi smiled, and put the coffee on.  
“He’s getting the sauna ready then.”   
It was strange to see his wife every day after so much time spent miles away, dug into the side of the hill or in a forest or a tent or a muddy trench, listening for Russian words in the night and pressing against Antti’s side and trying not to feel the fear they all were feeling. Knowing their wives were fleeing, or maybe had already fled, but not knowing where or when, breathing a sigh of relief when the letter came that they were in Sweden, dealing with such minor things as false friends and an unfamiliar tongue. And then the fear, the worst of it - falling to the ground with the hot metal in him, calling for Antti. Scared he wouldn’t come, that he was hit too - but sobbingly, desperately glad that unlike the other soldiers with their distant wives, if he died, at least he’d manage to die with the one he loved beside him.  
And then their wives - the two women they’d met at a dance, those women who held a knowing smile and flirted with the happy assurance of the disinterested, who had no feelings for the men around them and therefore nothing to lose - knowing that they were together. The humour of him and Antti tossing a coin for who would marry whom, to get the pensions and the all important piece of paper. Maybe children one day, although he’d never done more than kiss Tyyne and couldn’t imagine himself into her marriage bed. He wondered what Tyyne would make of the maleness of him, and if she’d see the thick white scar webbing its way across his thigh, the injury that Antti had dressed and soothed and touched, while dragging his shoulder and wincing from his own angry wound.  
He was glad that despite everything, they’d all made it.  
Tyyne sat down beside him at the table, and took a mouthful of coffee and chicory. She was a wonderful statuesque woman with broad Karjalan shoulders and fine, arching brows. Her hair had been cut in the war and was now too short to wear properly pinned, so she wore a kerchief, as if a proud peasant. She’d had a cow before the war broke out, whom she missed dearly, as though the freckled patient beast were a friend.   
She smiled, blew on the coffee and pulled a piece of knitting from her apron pocket.   
“Susi, how are you going with your socks?”

When Susi awoke the next morning, there was a cool, empty feeling at his back. Rokka wasn’t there.  
He got up, and got his porridge boiling. Put more wood in the kaakeliuuni, and began to knit. He had nearly finished the first sock. After breakfast, he went outside to fire up the sauna. Maybe Antti would be there already - but when he closed the door of the house he could see the sauna was cold, and hadn’t been used since yesterday.   
It was lonely taking sauna that day, and lonelier still when he finished and went back to the house and Antti still wasn’t there. Must have had a lot of wood to haul - but why didn’t he wake Susi to help him?  
He wished he had a dog to keep him company. He wondered if anyone nearby had any pups.

Antti didn’t come home at midday meal, so Susi didn’t bother to eat much more than bread and cheese. He wasn’t back until late afternoon, but came bearing gifts - a wrapped piece of piimäkakku.  
“Hey Susi, I was just helping the wives do some repairs,” he said breezily, busying himself by cutting slices of the cake and reheating a pot of stale coffee. “I didn’t wanna wake you.”  
“It’s never stopped you before,” said Susi.   
“Well y’know, I thought I’d better let Susi lie this morning, see if you prefer it. Maybe you don’t prefer it. Here! The bigger half.” He gave Susi his cake. “I thought I’d make the wives an extra chair or two so I don’t have to keep standing when I visit them,” Rokka continued. “We had a bit of spruce stored up that worked nicely!”  
Odd, Susi thought. The wives had three chairs already, but maybe one of them had broken.   
“Do you need my help with anything?”  
“I don’t want you to get sore,” Rokka said. “Your body’s not in great shape.”  
“Well neither is yours! You haven’t been the same since you carried me out of that ditch!”  
“Nah, it’s fine,” Rokka countered, as if the stiff shoulder and limited movement in his arm wasn’t the obvious impediment it was. He then breezily continued to prattle, and then was out the door for evening sauna, to soothe the knotted back he claimed was fine.   
Susi slumped into silence. He picked up a Swedish novel he’d been trying to read. The war had put in him a strong sense of impending displacement, as if any now and then he and Rokka would be thrown from the rough comfort of their house and shipped elsewhere. He was tired, but couldn’t relax, and his morning torpor was the result of midnight fretting. Waking, and not knowing where he was, frightened that at any moment the door would be kicked open and they’d be forced to march, that the Russians or the Germans or the Americans would be yelling orders at them. Reading Swedish, or trying to, was his attempt to gain some control. At least if they were forced to relocate west, he’d be able to speak more than broken Swedish. Rokka, on the other hand, was barely intelligible to most of the rest of Finland, and that didn’t seem to bother him. If people could only understand one in three of Rokka’s words, the sheer quantity of the words more than made up for the lack of comprehension.   
He missed the dog he didn’t have, as much as Tyyne missed her cow.

The next morning, Rokka woke him with scratchy, unshaven kisses all over his face. “Hey, Susi! Susi!”   
“Yeah….?” he slurred.  
“I’m gonna be out for a couple of hours ok? Gotta go get something from town.”  
And then, with a clatter of skis he was gone.  
Susi busied himself with his chores and then got to knitting, working a design of small hearts into the instep.   
Rokka’s mysterious errands and trips away continued for twelve more days. It wasn’t as if Susi expected his kaveri to give him a schedule, and often Rokka was away for several hours checking his traps or chopping ice or visiting his sister, but the absence felt even more pronounced. Perhaps it was because in winter, even Rokka usually slowed down a bit and spent more time inside whittling spoons or tying fishing flies, putting his feet on Susi’s lap, or spending a late afternoon in intimacy with him. At least he had Rokka with him at either end of the day, and in the evening Antti was still as affectionate as ever. Susi thought he could split apart with love for him. But where was he?   
Susi put on his boots and went to see his wife. The cold air hurt his bones.  
—————- 

There were four chairs in the house, and one of them looked new. Tyyne offered him some pulla.   
“Have you seen Rokka today?” he asked, while eating one of Tyyne’s proffered pullas. It wasn’t the best. Tyyne had a heavy hand with yeasted things, and the pulla could have been used as a doorstop.   
“Oh, he’s been by,” called Lyyti from the corner, where she was threading a sewing machine. “You must have just missed him on the way over.”   
“Tyyne,” Susi said quietly, “Rokka hasn’t been around much. He’s gone most of the day. If he’s got a lot of heavy work to do he shouldn’t really be doing it alone. Has he told you anything?”  
He tried to think whether Antti might be angry with him. They hadn’t fought, not as far as he could remember, and Antti wasn’t the type to keep his thoughts to himself. It wasn’t like him to stew. But it was disquieting to feel that his kaveri didn’t want to spend any time with him anymore.   
Susi entertained the idea that Antti had finally fallen into the arms of his wife, but it seemed laughable given their rather unusual arrangement.  
Tyyne smiled. “Oh, we know what Rokka’s doing, but I’m afraid we’re sworn to secrecy.”  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Susi grumpily.  
“He’s organising a surprise for you but it’s a big secret,” chimed in Lyyti over the whirr of her sewing.   
“Oh, I see.”   
“You both missed the last Christmas,” Tyyne said. “I think he wanted to do something special.” 

A week before Christmas.  
“Hey! Susi, wake up! We’re getting a tree.”   
This time, Rokka waited. Watched while Susi put on his trousers and his shirt and his pullover, and groaned when he leaned over to put on his socks. Then, limping to the door to put his boots on, sitting on a stool probably made for a child, on permanent loan from the schoolhouse. And then they were off, stamping into the forest a hair away from Russia, Rokka holding Susi’s hand.   
“What do you think?”   
They were at the tree already. Susi smiled into his scarf - Rokka must have scouted this one ahead of time. It was a young spruce, jewelled with ice. Susi cut the tree and helped him load it, trying to keep the load away from Rokka’s bad arm.   
They dragged it back to the house, swearing as they tugged the sled over buried rocks and hidden stumps. Then, they shook the ice from the tree, wedged it into place in the corner of the main room, and dressed it with tiny straw ornaments and one, solitary blown glass bauble from Germany, painted in red and gold.  
“Should have carved some tontut,” Rokka said, as he watched Susi standing on the table and hanging a battered but beautiful himmeli his mother had given him. It was a giant lofty geometric structure made out of rye straw, and remained magnificent despite hungry mice chewing on it during the war. “It’s just not Christmas without some elves around.”  
Susi fixed the himmeli to the beam and clambered down. “You know, Antti,”  
“Yes?”  
“I think we should get Tyyne a cow.”  
Rokka raised an eyebrow. “A cow? Yeah, why not get your wife a cow, I’m sure she’d like that. But lissen, when we’re on the subject of livestock, we’ve got a farm and we haven’t got so much as one ratty hen. Come spring we need to restock! And before you ask me about money, I’ve got the injury pension - no, lissen - and I’m gonna make some kilju again once I get a new still going, and before you ask I’m not going to drink it all myself! But a cow’s a good idea, a man can’t live without milk. Anyway, I’m going to make some glögi, you want some? Yeah, we might not have any cloves but I’ve got a cinnamon stick and some sugar and peppercorns, that oughta do.” Without waiting for an answer, Rokka walked over to the stove and poured a whole bottle of wine into a pot. “Oh and you know what? No farm’s a farm without a dog.”  
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Susi.  
“Yrjö’s dog just had pups,” Rokka said, looking in vain for sugar to sweeten the pot, and giving up and adding a spoonful of jam instead. “How’d you fancy a bear dog? I thought about a spitz for birding, but I don’t know anyone with spitzes and I know Yrjö keeps his dogs pretty sound. Get you a Karjalankarhukoira, and we can call him Little Susi.”  
“You can’t call him that, that’s too confusing!”  
“Well what else are we gonna call him, Mannerheim?”  
“Let’s wait until we see him, or her,” Susi said.   
“Great, we can go right after we’ve had our glögi.”

Christmas Eve dawned with a heavy rain, and not just kisses from Antti, but the scurrying paws and searching nose of an excited black-and-white dog trying to push between them.   
“Ah!” Susi said in mock protest, trying to remove the wriggling pup from the bed.   
“Susi, hey, merry Christmas!” said Rokka. “And he’s trying to say it too.”  
They had tentatively called the dog Sibelius, after Finland’s favourite son, but the name was too grand for a creature who still widdled on the floor and neither of them could bring themselves to use it.   
“I’ve put the rice porridge on already! The wives will be over later.” Antti started dressing. “Oh yeah, and Lyyti made us both shirts. Make sure to look surprised when she gives you yours.”  
“Are you going to spoil everyone’s presents then?” Susi said, as he watched Rokka look in vain for a pair of pants. “Merry Christmas, by the way! That’s quite a look. You should keep it for when the ladies come over. They’ve probably never seen one of those before.”  
“Really, Susi,” said Rokka, rolling his eyes. “Next yer gonna tell me you’ve never seen a pimppi. Don’t think that just cause they’re ladies they know nothing.” He finally found his trousers and put them on, then immediately took them off again. “Forgot my socks.”  
Ah, of course. Rokka insisted that socks should be put on before pants, and that it simply didn’t work trying to bunch the cuff of your sock into your pants leg, and if you gave up and tucked your pants leg into your socks you looked like you were worried about fabric snakes crawling up your leg. So, if you got the pants on first, you started again. With….  
Socks!  
“Wait!” said Susi. “I’ve got something for you.”  
He leaped out of bed, nearly tripped over Sibelius, and stumbled to the chest under the window, where he’d hidden his handiwork underneath the bible, where he knew Rokka would never bother looking. He’d wrapped it in a Russian propaganda leaflet, as it was the only spare paper he could lay his hands on.  
“Presents now?” said Rokka. He squinted at the paper. “Or are ya just trying to remind me of our Ruski-killing days? I’d put on Yokkantee but I haven’t got the record.” Rokka giggled. “Ya know what I always loved? Reading the Ruski stuff like it was just regular writing. ‘Poccnr!’ Anyway, should I open it now or wait until the wives are here?”  
“Now!” insisted Susi. “It’ll make more sense before you’re finished getting dressed.”  
“Ah, I get it.” said Rokka. “Oh shit! I nearly forgot - but I didn’t, see?” He reached into the sugar canister and pulled out a package. This was wrapped in what looked to be pieced-together pages from Struwwelpeter.  
“Struwwelpeter?”   
“Lyytti didn’t want it. I’ve never read it but she says it’s not very good. Gives the kids bad ideas, see. Anyway! Merry Christmas, Susi! Open it.”  
“Let’s open both of them.”  
“Sure, sure.”  
They both commenced ripping. Susi rented Struwwelpeter asunder to find a pair of neatly knitted woollen socks, in beautiful grey wool. He felt tears coming.  
“Antti, this is lovely.”  
“Aw, it’s nothing. I mean - wow!” Rokka was looking at his own new pair of socks, which were stranded colourwork in a range of hues of yellow and grey and brown. “These are so good, Susi! Where’d ya learn to knit like this?” Antti immediately sat down and proceeded to pull the socks on. “They’ve got little hearts on them! Aw, Susi! Yours are so much better than mine, I never learned to knit those little pictures.”  
“Antti, I love them. They’re wonderful because you made them.” Susi reached for him, and was pulled into an embrace. He felt his tears dampen Antti’s shoulder.   
“Suslein,” Antti said, stroking his back, “You know I love you, don’t you?”  
“That’s not why I’m crying, you know.”  
“Yeah, but I still gotta keep telling you.”  
“I keep thinking I’m going to lose you,” said Susi. “I know it’s silly but you weren’t there a lot, and - well, now I know why.” He laughed. “You were knitting me socks.”  
“You had holes in both of yours,” Antti said. “Can’t let my kaveri go around with four half-socks instead of one pair of good ones.” He gave Susi a squeeze. 

“Hey, Susi.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll always go back for you.”


End file.
